Three decisions you shouldn’t leave to your IT staff

Many people who run organizations often completely defer decisions about technology to their IT people. So what decisions do the people in charge of the business need to keep for themselves when it comes to IT? In my experience, there are three that matter most:

Which business and infrastructure processes should IT focus on?

Some projects will be business-critical but technically mundane; others will be breathtakingly state-of-the-art but merely nice to have. This decision is bet-the-business strategic and it should always be decided by the person(s) responsible for the whole enterprise, not just IT.

How much should be spent?

You’ll have to be specific about what you want from your IT spend. A mandate like “Get me a solution that improves our customer service” is way too squishy.

How should you spend it?

You might find that a modest project scope is more prudent, at least initially, than an enterprise-wide deployment. Or perhaps the project amounts to what’s called “utility computing” and you may be better off looking at a managed service/cloud computing option.